Germany drives four-year high euro economic revival

(BRUSSELS) - Germany posted Friday its best quarterly growth since reunification, driving Europe past the US in the recovery stakes as the continent recorded its best economic performance in four years.

Accelerating recoveries in Britain, France and even Spain also helped nudge Europe's main stock markets upwards, with only debt-laden Greece slipping deeper into recession as savage cuts scythe through spending.

However, with a growth rate of 2.2 percent between April and June, Germany was "playing in a league of its own," said senior ING economist Carsten Brzeski.

Jennifer McKeown of London-based Capital Economics noted that the 1.0 percent expansion across the 16 eurozone nations and the 27-member European Union as a whole was "the sharpest in four years."

It beat a 0.7-percent forecast and outpaced that of the US, which posted a quarterly gain of 0.6 percent -- down from 0.9 percent between January and March.

However, McKeown also said the surge "still looks worryingly lop-sided," citing greater global demand in industry and the depreciation of the euro.

Europe had barely managed 0.2 percent growth up to March, but Britain also posted 1.l percent growth with France holding at 0.6 percent -- providing welcome relief across the world's biggest open market as fears grow that the economies of the United States and China are running out of steam.

Compared to the same period of 2009, European growth measured a very healthy 1.7 percent.

While Greece's contraction worsened to 1.5 percent, even Romania said it had exited recession after seeing its GDP shrink for the previous six quarters.

Chris Williamson of London-based Markit economists said German manufacturers were winning export sales because concerns about weaker Mediterranean partners were helping to keep the euro weak.

"It remains to be seen if the buoyancy of the eurozone's core spills over to the periphery, or whether the periphery drags the core down."

After implementing draconian spending cuts in order to grasp its own 20-billion-euro lifeline from the EU and International Monetary Fund, Romania posted a quarterly growth rate of 0.3 percent.

The Baltic nations of Estonia and Lithuania also returned to positive growth, according to the official EU data, with only Sweden's recovery slowing, although it still logged a 1.2 percent improvement.

With a 4.1-percent increase compared to the second quarter of 2009, "such quarter-on-quarter growth has never been recorded before in reunified Germany," the national Destatis office said.

Communist East and free-market West Germany unified in October 1990 after a 45-year separation.